No. 12
Architect, probably Thomas Cubitt, 1836
On 2 November 1675 the Earl of St. Albans
and Baptist May granted this site to Fleetwood
Sheppard of London, gentleman, in trust for Sir
Cyril Wyche, one of the early Fellows (and later
President) of the Royal Society; (ref. 260) a rent of
£11 2s. was reserved. (fn. a) In August 1674 Wyche
was said to be 'now building a house in the square
in St. James's fields' (fn. 262) and was in occupation of it
in 1676 and 1677. (ref. 6) From 1686 to 1733 the
house was inhabited by the collector of vertu, the
eighth Earl of Pembroke, who in his will (fn. 263) left as
heirlooms the plate, pictures and furniture in the
St. James's Square house 'and also all the Books in
my Library in St. James's Square which are bound
in Turkey or Morocco Leather (not only because
they are scarce but of great use in Literature)'. If
Lord Pembroke embellished the interior of the
house no record of it survives: the views of the
square in c. 1722 and c. 1752 show an apparently
unaltered seventeenth-century exterior. In 1752
the house was empty, in 1753 the rates were paid
by John Price, in 1754 they were paid by Lord
Baltimore and in 1755 by John Price once more,
before the tenth Earl of Pembroke moved in. It is
not known whether John Price was the carpenter
of that name. (ref. 264) The house was again empty in
1759–62 and 1799–1805. It is not clear whether
the house shown in Ackermann's view of 1812
(Plate 131) had been rebuilt or was the original
house with a stucco façade.
From 1833 the house was occupied by Lord
King (later Earl of Lovelace) who probably
bought the house at about that time. In July 1835
he married Byron's daughter Ada, and in the
following year had the house demolished and rebuilt. (ref. 6) The work is attributed to Thomas
Cubitt (ref. 265) and has considerable affinity with his
two great houses at Albert Gate, all appearing to
derive from the earlier houses of Adelaide
Crescent, Hove, designed by Decimus Burton
shortly before 1830.<The attribution to Cubitt is confirmed by the Architectural Magazine, vol. 5, 1838.>
The Italianate front (Plate 200a) is of brick,
faced and ornamented with stucco. It is a bold
design, outvying its neighbours in scale and richness, three bays wide and three lofty storeys in
height. The windows and doorway of the ground
storey are round-arched and set with plain margins
in an arcade, the face of which is V-jointed, the
arches rising from a plain impost. The doorway
in the right-hand bay is sheltered by a porch
formed of plain-shafted Doric columns, with
respondent antae, supporting a triglyphed and
mutuled entablature, its cornice being returned
and continued across the rest of the front to form
a balcony, supported by scrolled console-brackets.
This balcony has a balustrade of waisted (Bramante) balusters between solid dies. The upper
part of the front is bounded by long-and-short
chamfered quoins, and presents a plain face mockjointed to represent ashlar. Each of the three
first-floor windows is dressed with a moulded
architrave, flanked by panelled pilaster-strips and
consoles supporting a plain frieze and a low-pitched
triangular pediment. The three second-floor
windows have moulded architraves, rising from a
sill-band of guilloche ornament. The three atticstorey windows are secreted between the massive
scroll-consoles which support the cornice of the
deep crowning entablature.
In plan (fig. 27), the house is divided by transverse walls into three parts, the front containing,
on the ground floor, a large room on the west and
a spacious entrance hall on the east. This leads
directly into the staircase hall, with an ante on the
east which is open, through an Ionic colonnade of
three bays, to the square well where the stone
stairs rise against the south, west and north sides to
a first-floor landing gallery extending along the
east and south sides. Beyond the staircase-hall ante
is a large room, entered through a Corinthian
screen of three bays and having a large canted bay
at its north end. On the west side of this room is
the service stair and a passage leading to a long
narrow wing at the rear, with another stair at the
end of it. Beyond the canted bay and flanking the
wing is a later addition, consisting of two linked
octagonal compartments, both top-lit, and a short
staircase with a glazed barrel-vault, leading to a
large, almost square, room with a fireplace at each
end and three windows overlooking Ormond
Yard. The drawing-room suite, on the first floor,
consists of a large front room, the full width of the
house, linked by a top-lit ante to the back room
(Plate 200c), which is bay-ended like the room
below.
Figure 27:
No. 12 St. James's Square, plans
Although the front is Italianate, the interior
was originally decorated in the 'Grecian' taste,
with a discreet use of stock ornaments in cast
plaster—cornices of anthemion and honeysuckle
ornament, and borders of grape-vine surrounding
ceilings modelled with large but shallow square
coffers. The original marble chimneypieces have
squat pilaster jambs and entablature lintels. But
these chaste decorations were not enough for a
later occupant, who covered the walls in the drawing-room suite with French Rococo panels and
rich friezes, and installed elaborate doorcases in
the same manner. The front room on the ground
floor lacks this Rococo embellishment, but has a
splendid mid eighteenth-century marble chimneypiece, richly carved, which is the subject of an
illustration in fig. 119 of Francis Lenygon's
Decoration in England from 1660 to 1770.
The staircase hall is little changed. The walls
are quite plain except for a band of anthemion
ornament at first-floor level. The skylight is surrounded by a deep cove, its face covered with lowrelief scale decoration, and a boldly modelled palm
branch in each angle. The cast-iron balusters of
the stair railing are of two patterns, used alternately,
both basically the same but one enriched and
wreathed with ivy. The cove surrounding the
skylight in the drawing-room ante is Graeco-Egyptian in character, and also has palm branches
in each angle (Plate 200b). The upper part of the
house, and the later additions on the ground floor,
are of little interest.